Tamsin went down the Undercroft stair with a lamp in one hand and a cup of warm goat’s milk in the other, because a child who had been counting for a week would be thirsty, and because nobody else in the Hold seemed to have thought of it.
She had thought of it at supper. The Kitchen had been full of the midwinter soup, the thick brown kind with barley and the Lowgate onions, and she had sat with her bowl going cold in front of her and listened to the Hands talk about the stair and the rope and the clerk who had named himself, and none of them had said a word about the child on the step below. They had all been careful not to. They were frightened of it. She had seen that in the set of their shoulders and the way they kept turning their heads toward the stone, as though the sound might come up through the floor of the Great Hall and sit down beside them at table.
Tamsin was not frightened of it. She had tended goats for two hundred years, one way or another, and she knew the look of a young thing that has been left alone too long in the dark. It was not wicked. It was only lonely, and it did not know that a lonely thing could be fed.
